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[arborist]

Last thread I'm bumping now, and probably the most important because this is still in development...

This game reminds me a lot of an ancient and beloved friend of a game called noctis. Putting that aside...
I know how frustrating knowing what you want to do, and not quite hitting it can be.

But please remember, the sort of people who look forward to a game aren't the ones who need to see 'progress.'
Progress can be debugging something, finding a loose bracket, staring intently at malformed code until it eureka's into what you wanted... Or another dead end, but one that might open up in the future.

So, to take inspiration...
Here are some questions!

• Will we be able to interact with the ship in a friendly manner? Even if it's an AI-less hunk of metal, I like the idea of the important bricks (they are very important)... Or perhaps decorating it slowly, or just otherwise making it feel cosier. Personally, I want to thank the auto-navigation unit for not doing what I do and bumping into planets to death!
• Would you consider skyboxes for planets with atmosphere? I actually prefer simpler ones. Not in-depth, but... Odd, bizarre, alien, melancholic. Somehow, I think there might be a chance to see that sort of thing in ZSPACE.
• How open would you be to players writing exploration logs? Even if they see the same planets/similar planets?
• If I foolishly decide to pilot myself around, what is the risk of becoming space dust because I cannot into piloting?
• If you ever add 'victory' conditions, will there be an option for players to just... Keep cruising? (Please make it so!)

There's a lot more I could ask, but that's it.

Now, for the morale-boosting!













But I'm doing the best I can!

So do your best, too!

Well, that's about enough for me.
I'm going to disappear into the shadows again...
Hopefully this gave you a bit of inspiration, though.

Good night.

[nova++]

Thanks for such a big reply - lemme work through the points...

This game reminds me a lot of an ancient and beloved friend of a game called noctis.

I've heard of it! I think I gave it a shot a few years back but had trouble getting it running, I need to give it another go sometime.

But please remember, the sort of people who look forward to a game aren't the ones who need to see 'progress.'
Progress can be debugging something, finding a loose bracket, staring intently at malformed code until it eureka's into what you wanted... Or another dead end, but one that might open up in the future.

Yeah. It's tough to keep that feeling for yourself, though. I've done so much on this but there's still so much to do.

Will we be able to interact with the ship in a friendly manner? Even if it's an AI-less hunk of metal, I like the idea of the important bricks (they are very important)... Or perhaps decorating it slowly, or just otherwise making it feel cosier. Personally, I want to thank the auto-navigation unit for not doing what I do and bumping into planets to death!

Oh yes, that's part of the intention of the game, making the ship feel like yours. I do want there to be some manner of character to the ship, even though it doesn't really have any sort of governing AI personality, it still has its own behavior to some degree, and the beings who designed and programmed it had their own esoteric sense of humor that can show through sometimes.

Would you consider skyboxes for planets with atmosphere? I actually prefer simpler ones. Not in-depth, but... Odd, bizarre, alien, melancholic. Somehow, I think there might be a chance to see that sort of thing in ZSPACE.

Well, it's all seamless space-to-ground, so what you see in the sky depends on what's around you. Clouds in the sky would be part of the local FX of the planet, moons/other planets/stars in the sky are rendered the same way they are in space, etc. I know what you mean about wanting them more alien, though, I want there to be far more strange sights in this game than familiar ones.

How open would you be to players writing exploration logs? Even if they see the same planets/similar planets?

Definitely, the databank will have a section on each entry for the player to write their own notes about what they might have found there.

If I foolishly decide to pilot myself around, what is the risk of becoming space dust because I cannot into piloting?

There is a risk, but space is big and reaction times tend to be fairly long. Manual piloting is actually an important part of the game, but there are a lot of helper functions to make it easier. I have what I think is a fairly intuitive flight system/interface that still obeys real physics. At some point when I make a big demo video of the game, I'll point out all these little details and explain how they work.

But yes, you definitely can make some craters if you aren't careful. The ship has a tough hull made of Advanced Space Metal(tm), as well as shields of some kind, but it's not invincible. Definitely tougher than, say, a car, but hitting a planet's surface at 4,000 meters per second will end your journey pretty quick.

If you ever add 'victory' conditions, will there be an option for players to just... Keep cruising? (Please make it so!)

No need to worry about that. For better or for worse, I'm adamant on there being no actual end state for the game. I mean, maybe if you tally up the 90 million systems you're assigned to you'd get a "congratulations!" message, but apart from that, nah 

Now, for the morale-boosting!













But I'm doing the best I can!

So do your best, too!

Well, that's about enough for me.
I'm going to disappear into the shadows again...
Hopefully this gave you a bit of inspiration, though.

Good night.

I do appreciate it. Hopefully you didn't disappear so much that you never see my answers to your questions 

[arborist]

Thanks for such a big reply - lemme work through the points...

Don't worry, I'm not that ephemeral! Actually, I'm a little miffed that my links auto-turned into full videos, clogging up the thread, but - where was I..?

Although you didn't have to actually go through all my points, your answers were incredibly appreciated. For what it's worth, the most pressing thing - I'll be around for a bit, so if you need to bounce ideas off of someone's skull, or just vent do know mine is probably even stronger than Advanced Space Metal(tm)!

But the answers in general were just, very encouraging. Pretty much everything I'd hoped to hear, which is why I'll continue to be on call!
That's it for now, but I'm glad it helped - even a little.

[nova++]

Don't worry - I'm not giving up on it. I just need to slow a bit and focus on some other stuff for a bit, there are things to do I've been neglecting. Plus I haven't been able to be very productive anyway because my chair has been kind of failing, so I tried moving to a standing desk, which only really has given me sore feet and less ability to focus. So... I'll be able to get more done when I get that situation sorted. But until then, I'm going to take a break and just worry about cleaning things up around here, getting a new chair, some general self-care sorta stuff, and so on.

Soon enough I'm going to make a proper demonstration video of the game. I actually have some decent video editing software now, so that will be nice for actually adding some info text explaining things that are happening as they happen. No voiceover though, sorry. My voice chip isn't too good.

[szczm_]

That was so nice, arborist.

I'm also here lurking, never forgetting about your project. I have one more question to add: what soundtrack do you wish to have in ZSPACE?

[arborist]

Thank you, szczm_!

I'm trying to be a bit braver, as of late. I think everyone could use a pick-me-up now and then. (Also, speaking of... I just grabbed a copy of raymarching, it looks dream-like! Maybe I'll even contribute a screen, later!)

Sorry to hear that your workspace isn't working out as intended though, NovaSilisko. Self-care is incredibly important, and a break sounds perfect. But I second szczm_'s question, when you have the time for it. I want to hear what your ideal sound would sound like!

[nova++]

I have one more question to add: what soundtrack do you wish to have in ZSPACE?

Ambient stuff, calm, slow. Unobtrusive. Brian Eno esque.

I'm still debating on how to actually structure it... while on the one hand it's nice to have the individuality of unique, specifically composed tracks, having some sort of procedural music engine calls to me.

That's a bit easier with less-structured ambient things - it can have different elements pre-matched to different notes and keys, and select them based on what is compatible with what, perhaps working its way through the circle of fifths over time. Different loops of chords, maybe something that builds a repeating melody and sticks with it for a while, alongside pre-made samples for different compatible keys. There's a lot of things I could do, but they all depend on how deep I want to make it.

It's also important that it not be running all the time, I'd say probably 60%-40% on-off. It would slowly emerge from the background, becoming distinguishable from the ambient noise, and fade away in the same way. This specifically, if only just a little bit, harkens back years ago to when I last played minecraft a lot - when a song playing was a rare event and always felt kind of special.

[Schrompf]

Sounds good to me! I'm an large-scale dark ambient consumer while at work, so I naturally oppose your "compatible keys" plan, but apart from that it sounds great! I still have fond memories of Half Life, where music was rare and for specific occasions, but when it rose, it hit hard. For an exploration game, the ship's background noises might already be enough for a while. Slight humming close to some machinary, high frequency crackling on top in case it needs repairing, air moving through the ventilation system, maybe an occasional TSSSHHH when the cooling system pumps jump to action. You could probably sync this with occasional tunes - icy-themed when you're far from the current star, metallic screeches while close to a derelict (you have those, will you?), rain noises for gas giants... dammit, now I wanna make my own exploration game.

[nova++]

You know, I completely forgot to bring up some things I meant to when I was last talking about render pipeline stuff. A very important thing here is dealing with multiple suns. I don't really want to mess around with HDR as I mentioned, but multiple-sun stuff is something of an annoyance. If you just end up taking the light from every star and adding it together, your immediate result is that everything gets too damn bright. There's different ways to blend the different lights, of course, but that's where the problem lies. I'd quite like to make use of the built in PBR shading stuff for the sake of fidelity but if I want to screw around with how light sources blend together, I start getting into the territory of needing to rewrite stuff, which really quickly turns into a serious can of worms and just uuugghh

[fluffrabbit]

The thing is that stars are really fricking bright up close, so when you double the number of suns you need to double your f-stop. The only physically accurate brightness is that which adds energy (color += light) so HDR is the only physically correct way to see everything without it getting blown out.

One approach you could try without having to blend lights or use PBR is to divide the brightness of each sun by the number of suns in the system so that the total light is the same in each system. That's just a parameter on the light source and should work with any pipeline.

[nova++]

A sincere question - is it truly that important to keep the lighting physically accurate when going for a semi-stylized look? This is something I've grappled with for a long time.

I guess my personal design philosophy would cheerfully deviate from the accurate real math in favor of something that I have more control over and/or better suits the aesthetic I have in mind. Opposition surge is one example where this happened - when I added that to the old terrain shader (still need to bring it back over), rather than rely on the actual numbers based on surface properties etc, it was just a few basic numbers to change its appearance.

[fluffrabbit]

A sincere question - is it truly that important to keep the lighting physically accurate when going for a semi-stylized look? This is something I've grappled with for a long time.

Technically your lighting is not physically accurate anyways because sunlight is several stops brighter than interior lighting (unless you installed HMI security lights in the living room). I like the aesthetic and it would be distracting to see the iris shift constantly as you look around. It looks great as is. The physics of light is merely a guide for when you are indecisive on how to implement something.

I guess my personal design philosophy would cheerfully deviate from the accurate real math in favor of something that I have more control over and/or better suits the aesthetic I have in mind. Opposition surge is one example where this happened - when I added that to the old terrain shader (still need to bring it back over), rather than rely on the actual numbers based on surface properties etc, it was just a few basic numbers to change its appearance.

I'm not familiar with the terrain thing you're talking about but I would like to see it.

I was merely suggesting dividing the brightness of each light source as a simple approach to the problem you presented. I don't think there is a good way to blend lights while keeping the brightness down. If you're just adding it's simple.

Let's say Sun 1 has a starting brightness of 1.5 and Sun 2 has a starting brightness of 1.0. At a distance, let's say the brightness falloff halves, resulting in 1.5 * 0.5 + 1.0 * 0.5 = 1.25 brightness at the pixel, which clips white. If you don't want it to clip, you can simply tell the program that the starting brightness is divided by the sun count, so 1.5 / 2 = 0.75 and 1.0 / 2 = 0.5. Then the shader doesn't have to change and at the same distance 0.75 * 0.5 + 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.625, which is less than 1.0, so it does not clip.

[nova++]

Oh yes, I got trigger happy and forgot to respond to your idea. I've thought about doing that for sure, although there's situations where it might look odd - say you've got two stars fairly distant, such that one is lighting you far more than the other. If you divide the brightnesses of both of them, then it's unnaturally dim. So you'd need to balance out the brightnesses based on how... bright... each one is.

But I also have actually done, in a shader, an alternate method - I forget the actual math, but you aren't doing an additive approach, it just kind of gets closer and closer to 1 rather than actually truly adding. Space Engine does basically the same thing, as well (talking with one of the devs is what got me to try it).

I did this for the distant planet shader - which for various reasons has its lighting done separately from Unity's built in - and it worked quite well, looked just like how I wanted. I forget if I left it enabled, but I really wish I could do that for the interior sunlight as well as the terrain sunlight.

This has the disadvantage that a prerequisite to doing it basically means writing my own massive set of shaders...

[fluffrabbit]

If it has the aesthetic you want, that's great, but if it's inconsistent with the interior lighting, that's not so great.

I guess you could try modified approaches to adjusting the brightness of stars. I'm assuming all stars have the same falloff distance, otherwise the math could be more complex. Something like:

Code:

desired_brightness = 1.0;
total_brightness = 0.0;
for( light in lights ){
    total_brightness += light.brightness;
}
scale_brightness = desired_brightness / total_brightness;
for( light in lights ){
    light.brightness *= scale_brightness;
}

[nova++]

If it has the aesthetic you want, that's great, but if it's inconsistent with the interior lighting, that's not so great.

Yeah. That's the crux of it. Some sort of dynamic scaling of brightnesses between all stars might be the way to go in the end. I mean, if my options are "scale brightnesses cleverly" or "build an entirely new shader family"... I know which one I'm picking

Brightness falloff is... a bit of an interesting problem. In real life, for the same exposure level, Neptune is obviously far darker than Mars. You can see this quite clearly in photographs of Jupiter passing behind the moon (and the moon's material is quite dark, too, making the effect even more stark in comparison):



I think what I want to do is do basically a custom light falloff curve that messes with an actual inverse-square falloff so it's not too bright up close, but not too dim far away. And then from that modified curve, it can attempt to normalize the brightnesses...?

I guess it's something!

Oh yes, and the opposition surge I was talking about:



A combination of slightly retroreflective material, and particles hiding their own shadows opposite the sun (the camera seems to have a slight vignette which makes it even more prominent). I always like the look of this effect very much. One of the old pictures had it but I guess I removed it in favor of a newer one.

[fluffrabbit]

That image of the moon and Jupiter looks rather nice. Both objects are in the proper exposure range, but I guess up close Jupiter could look a little dim with that aperature.

And then from that modified curve, it can attempt to normalize the brightnesses...?

How? Based on the distance of an object from the light sources? I guess you should be able to scale brightness per planet, ship, etc.

Oh yes, and the opposition surge I was talking about:

What is that? Is that from a game? It looks extremely realistic.

[nova++]

That image of the moon and Jupiter looks rather nice. Both objects are in the proper exposure range, but I guess up close Jupiter could look a little dim with that aperature.

Yeah, that's the thing. If you compare it to more familiar pictures of Jupiter with longer exposures, it's more obvious that it's underexposed when the camera has been adjusted for the moon: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Jupiter_and_its_shrunken_Great_Red_Spot.jpg

How? Based on the distance of an object from the light sources?

Heh. Beats me.  I'm just going to have to experiment with it, really.

What is that? Is that from a game? It looks extremely realistic.

It's from the Hayabusa 2 space probe, at the asteroid Ryugu. Asteroids are a great place to see it, it seems like. Their surfaces are very rough and ragged and have those retroreflective qualities. http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/galleries/onc/nav20181024/

[fluffrabbit]

That's really neat. I'm not sure if either metallic or roughness PBR materials correspond to retroreflectivity (I know certain phenomena like iridescence and phase shift aren't part of current implementations) but there is the additional issue of requiring shadowing information.

Shadow maps are generally subtractive, so you would need a signed shadow buffer (floating point values rather than 8-bit). A post-processing shader on the shadow buffer could make shadowed areas negative and the areas immediately around them positive with a blur. Then the shadow buffer would be added to the surface and you would get the effect.

To account for retroreflectivity, a "retroreflective" texture (like the metallic and roughness textures) could render to a full-screen buffer (like if you're doing deferred rendering or you could just take advantage of any post-proces setup that's already happening) and in the pass where the shadow buffer is being applied, any positive shadow value is multiplied by the "retroreflective" value.

[nova++]

My faux retroreflectivity was decidedly simpler. It just took the dot product of the pixel to the anti-solar point, hit it with an exponent, and then modulate it with the surface color. Obviously not physically accurate, but it looked good and believable.

[fluffrabbit]

My faux retroreflectivity was decidedly simpler. It just took the dot product of the pixel to the anti-solar point, hit it with an exponent, and then modulate it with the surface color. Obviously not physically accurate, but it looked good and believable.

That's great! I thought from the photos that it was a sort of lensing effect, but if it works on your asteroids, as the saying goes, "if it looks right it is right".